As an Everton fan I'm biased but Barkley and Stones would have made far more sense for this game. Slovakia came for a point, so why not use a defender to help build attacks? Cahill came forward with the ball once, **** his pants and passed backwards. As for Barkley, if England's tactic was to shoot right at defenders from 2 yards away he is clearly the premier proponent of that in the squad and should have been allowed to show it off.

Portugal aren't anything to be afraid of, the worry would be that we'd play France in the quarter finals.
If we win the group we get a 3rd place team and then likely the winner of Group F winner (probably Portugal) and Group E second place (probably Belgium) in the quarters.

Stones' defending was fine. He slipped, but that was nothing to do with his defending.
I had didn't have much issue with his first attempt to play out from the back, although Forster seeming a bit panicked and Lallana trying a lay off without knowing what was around him made it seem worse than it was. This is perhaps the issue Stones has though, in that he can see the route out and it seems perfectly logical, but others don't and he causes panic. His second attempt was worse because he allowed them to get too tight to him for a chipped ball and the ricochet could have gone anywhere.

In time Barkley will be able to play central midfield, but I think defensively he would struggle as one of the two sitting midfielders. His attitude to defending is basically standing in front of the person with the ball, if they call his bluff and dribble around him in a reasonably wide arc, he will let them.
Likewise, I don't trust Henderson in a holding role. He needs someone behind him.
We don't have any full backs who are better at defending than attacking, so let them attack. Play positionally disciplined central midfielders and realise you don't need out and out wide players, so the full backs have space to overlap and cover if we lose the ball.

That bit did make me laugh. Ashley Cole played approximately 5 games in the second half of the 2013/14 season and then was essentially out of football 6 months after the World Cup. Anyone who thinks he could have helped England were remembering him as he was at his best, not at that point.

But not for not protecting Baines. Rooney was the left sided forward, Gerrard was the left sided central midfielder. They should both have seen he was being doubled up on (and he was telling them) and Rooney didn't have the discipline or energy to track back and Gerrard either didn't have the tactical intelligence to recognise it or he wanted to hide in the centre.

Is Baines not playing well? Or is this one of those things that if you repeat it enough times it becomes true?
Much like Baines being out of his depth at the World Cup because he couldn't defend against 2 players. Nothing to do with Rooney and/or Gerrard not helping him out at all (but it doesn't pay to criticise them).